2007-10-10 11:23 p.m.
PostSecret
Warning: don't read if in a susceptibly emotional mood. This is a rather dark meditation on existence. Mine, to be precise.
Every week, on Sunday, the first thing I do is click over to the PostSecret website.
Obviously, today's not Sunday. But today I found out that next Tuesday, the creator of the project will be downtown talking at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and I want to go. So it started me thinking about the project.
Secrets. What's yours?
I have too many. Sometimes it seems like my life is one huge secret. Like no matter how surrounded by friends and family I am, I'm always alone because nobody really knows me because I'm hiding things.
Secrets. What are mine? Let me count the ways...
I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen. The first time I planned a way to do it, I was ten. I got over the suicidal tendencies by 16, but remained severely depressed. I had two other DiaryLand blogs during that time, both passworded and under my 'real' name...and I'm still pen pals with the four girls who supported me through that time.
My mother was abused, and she in turn emotionally abused my siblings and I, and we all pretended to be a happy, normal little family so the social services wouldn't break us up. I'm the middle child, younger than my sister by 6 years and older than my brother by only 1, but I'm the responsible one. It's my job to keep mom from hitting my sister, from emotionally attacking my brother to the point where he would flee the house and get drunk or stoned and not come home until well after dark and he was having hallucinations.
I've never felt so guilty in my life as I did when I got my acceptance letter from Santa Cruz. It meant I was free. It meant I could leave. My siblings couldn't. I would no longer be able to be responsible for Mom, Brother, and Sister.
For Dad, Stepmom, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, Grandma, I'm the light in their existence, the child who's not fucking up. But I'm not happy. Not really. Not when I feel guilty every single time I catch myself laughing or dancing across the meadows or revelling in the feel of raindrops on my face and the smell of redwoods in the air. I feel guilty because I'm not miserable.
I tried to hate my mother. Tried to blame her for everything. When I failed to hate her, understanding only too well why she was so fucked up, I turned the hate inward. I have managed to hate myself so completely that my suicide attempts were less out of despair than pure loathing. I'm finally learning to love myself, thanks to the most amazing friends in the entire universe.
If people so incredible as them can love me, I can almost believe that I'm not as reprehensible as I once thought.
The only thing I want to do with myself is run away. I can't stay here. I'm haunted by my existence, by the reminders of who and what I am. By my own inadequacy to somehow be perfect or to have a normal life. All I want is to escape.
I've mentally blocked over 90% of my childhood. I know why. It's full of anger and fear and frustration and despair and fighting and desperation and there's almost nothing positive to be found there. My first memory is of my little brother coming out of the hospital after his appendectomy less than six months after his birth. I, apparently, was one of those children who's fully cognizant almost straight out of the womb. But do I remember much?
Of course not.
My second memory is of cowering in my sister's room while my mom and dad screamed so loud the walls shook. At least that's how my four year old brain remembered it.
I hate having constant reminders of all the things I'm trying to leave. The thing that's so damning is that everything is a reminder. The reminder's in the fact that my best friend at university laughs just like my sister on those rare occasions when she can be persuaded to do more than smile faintly. In the clouds of marijuana smoke that smell like my brother. In the photographs tucked between pages of books of my friends and I laughing on one of our misadventures.
I feel bad when I have fun. I feel this way because I know that my sister has probably never had a day of pure, unadulterated fun in her life. She became responsible for my brother and I when she was 12. She was always responsible for my mother. She still thinks she's responsible for me. She doesn't realize that when she tries to defend me it just makes things worse.
Especially when she doesn't defend me.
Here's the truth of my existence. The truth as I've never told it and will probably never tell it again, because I'm incapable of trusting people:
The people I love and respect most are the people I hate and fear most. I have no relationship with anyone that isn't utterly contradictory.
I deliberately sabotage my relationships with people, setting up situations they can't possibly meet my expectations in, and then use that 'failing' as proof that I never really wanted them around anyway because I'm afraid to trust them. I'm afraid to believe in people.
I've only ever been disappointed before.
Your family is supposed to be where you learn to love and trust people. You're supposed to be able to rely on them. I didn't have that. I have this complex network of perpetually shifting alliances that, most of the time, end up being drawn with me getting screwed over.
I'm the most neutral party, sadly. Because I'm not neutral at all. No matter how much I want to be, I'm never neutral. But I'm more so than Mom, who always takes my Brother's side, especially against me. I think Mom blames me for her marriage and divorce with Dad. If she hadn't gotten pregnant with me, they never would have married. They started fighting over decisions about how to raise me. Dad left on my sixth birthday.
(Sometimes I wonder if she isn't right about that.)
My Brother and I are usually on opposite sides in fights. He doesn't like me trying to guide him in making choices about things. He says I'm too uptight, don't have enough fun. Fun, to him, is indiscriminate drinking, drug use, and sex. I'm straight-edge because I don't want to get suckered into hurting myself anymore. He's just doing it to escape whatever mess is inside his head. I try to get him to stop, or at least lighten up, but he just laughs at me and tells me to stop being such a nag.
(I just don't want to see him get hurt any more than he already has.)
When he was 5 and Dad left, he asked Mom to never leave. He doesn't remember that. A couple years after, and Mom was never home. She was always out with a boyfriend who didn't want to be 'bothered' by us kids.
Mom never believed us about what a Jackass he was. It took his cheating on her before she finally dumped him, and even then she spent weeks crying over it. Sometimes I think she seeks out these abusive relationships because she doesn't think she deserves to be loved or because that's how she saw her parents interact. I wish she wouldn't. (Maybe then she could begin to heal.)
Mom and I fight about everything. I'm the kid she can't predict or control.
My sister is the controllable one. She takes Mom's side in everything. Mom's the only parent she ever had, and for a long time it was just the two of them. Left unresolved is the fact that Mom had originally planned to abort her...I wonder what that must do to my sister's mind. My sister also sides with Mom out of a fear of retaliation and conflict. Unless backed completely into a corner, she won't even defend herself, but rather try to flee. When Mom and I are fighting, my sister backs Mom up, and only after everyone's gone to sleep will she sneak out to check on me and make sure I'm okay.
I don't even know how many of these little betrayals I've lived through. I just accept it as the way things are now. My sister will side with my mother, maybe interfering when Mom hits me, and she only comes to check on me when she can be certain that no retaliation is forthcoming.
And yet, my sister is probably the main reason I didn't actually succeed in killing myself. My brother comes in close second, but my sister...she's always been first. She's always been first to me, but I can't help but wonder if I have ever been first to her.
My brother is the kid Mom can predict. They fight, he leaves, he hammers his brain with one substance or another, he comes home. The length of time spent on each one varies, but it always goes like that. He always comes back, despite swearing each time that "this is it". Somewhere inside, he's still the 5 year old who's terrified of losing his family.
He and I never talk of anything important. We love each other in the singularly fucked up way that only brother and sister can - especially when they grew up in a fighting household like ours.
So I'm the neutral one. But neutral doesn't mean that you're safe. Neutral just means that the only side you're on is your own. And it usually means you're under siege.
I'm also the one who escaped.
All along, I've planned my escape. I was supposed to leave, and then my sister and brother would follow. But somewhere, somehow, things just got so utterly fucked up that now...now, who knows.
I have a meeting tomorrow morning about applying to study abroad. After that, I'm going to go to my college advisor and begin the process of declaring a major in Linguistics.
(I am going to leave one day, and I will never come back.)
I will move to Europe. I will study there, make friends, investigate charities or other social-help groups that I can work for when I make my move, and I will permanently relocate.
I am going to run away to a place where nothing reminds me of home, and then I am going to disappear.
Maybe I'll find peace. Maybe I'll just find more guilt. I don't know. I just know I can't keep doing this.
I can't keep burying my emotions so far down that the only ones I can express are "cheerful", "sugar-high", "excited - in a mundane sense, as for a book or movie release", and "tired". I can't keep being followed around by this guilt and responsibility that are doing nothing for me but eating at my soul.
I can't save everyone. (It's going to be hard enough to save myself.)
Hardest about that realization is the fact that I can't save my sister. My brother. My mom. Not from themselves. And they're the biggest enemies they have right now. I know. You can't run from yourself. You can't run from your soul. You can't run from your secrets.
There's so much more I want to say about this, but if I keep going, I'll start crying. And if I start crying, I'll have to explain to my down-the-halls and next-doors what was going on.
They care, but not enough to want to hear all this shit.
One day, I will save myself. Maybe then I'll be able to help others save themselves. That's one thing I've learned - only you can save you. Yeah, Prince Charming can kiss you out of sleep, but only Snow White can spit that apple out and learn the lesson. Only Cinderella can get out of the ball at midnight "faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo" and prove that she was the girl by way of a mysterious glass slipper. Only Sleeping Beauty can keep curiosity from overcoming her the next time she sees a spinning wheel. Only the princess can save herself, for all that Prince Charming usually gets the credit.
I don't claim to know anything. I don't claim to be special. I don't claim to be anything other than me. I don't even claim to know what "me" is, beyond a vague concept.
I don't claim any of those things. But I do maintain certain positions. And one of those is that everyone is entitled to be happy, to live in peace. To be loved. And if you don't have that, you need to go find it. You need to seek it out and chase after your destiny, because if you were waiting for the opportune moment - this is it.
It's almost 1 AM, and my meeting for study abroad is at 10. I'd better go now. Good night.
